Palm tree poachers plaguing the Valley

Some sought-after native plants fetch $3,600 at resale

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 30, 2004

HARLINGEN -- For five spring weekends in a row, the plant poachers were at work at Bence Nursery.

The take included expensive topiary plants, such as spiral junipers worth $200 to $250 each, and native plants, along with pygmy date palms and bottle palms. During the weekend raids in February and March, they climbed the fence, grabbed the plants and fled into the South Texas night.

"These are just jackleg landscapers, people who started out mowing lawns, and they say, `Oh yeah, lady, I can fix your yard.' And then they come to a nursery and steal the plants, and it's 100 percent profit," explained Alvin Dunn, who has managed the nursery for 18 years. "Or take it to a flea market on the weekend; if they can sell it for a third of what we get, it's pure profit for them."

From one end of the Rio Grande Valley to the other, shadowy legions of palm rustlers, plant poachers and peyote pickers are helping themselves to an extensive -- and lucrative -- array of native plant species growing wild on private property or by nurseries, a number of plant experts and nursery owners say.

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From ebony, wild olives, live oaks, retamas, yuccas and stout sago palms to rare and stately Texas sabal palms, the trade in stolen plants is widespread and growing, they say.

"It's an ongoing problem, mostly from a very few individuals who perpetuate the problem," said Glyn Whiddon, a Harlingen nursery operator for 30 years and the owner of Stuart Place Nursery. He said the most recent thefts were three weeks ago when three expensive palms in large containers were stolen from his nursery.

"I have fields of palms also, and we're losing palms out of our fields, and we've also had thefts from our container nursery," said Whiddon, who said midnight rustlers have removed 50 expensive queen palms from his 15-acre palm garden in the past 30 to 60 days. "There's a good profit margin when you don't have to pay for anything," Whiddon notes.

Lisa Williams, project director for the Nature Conservancy in the Valley, is worried that thieves may attempt to remove a stand of rare star cactus and other species on the foundation's 350-acre Chihuahuan Woods Preserve in remote Starr County.

"Poaching is a big problem in the Valley, and it's not just rare species," Williams says. "But with rare species the concern is much greater because they could number in the low hundreds or thousands known to exist in the world."

Stanley Crockett, a third-generation nursery operator, said plant poachers "ripped us off blind" at a 200-acre palm garden he operated a few miles from his commercial nursery in Harlingen. The harvesters helped themselves to expensive Texas sabal, sago and other palms he was raising for resale.

"But I think the biggest problem isn't with palms, it's the native species," Crockett said. "There's a big push to go native, and they're stealing retama, Texas sabals, ebony and huisache. The landscapers are specifying that, and there is no commercial production -- it's all being poached off of private or federal property."

"I don't know how, when or what, but I know stuff comes from the wild," Davis said. "Nobody, to my knowledge, does field production of native (tree) species. It comes from the monte," using the Spanish term for thickets of native brush.

In some instances, the thefts are from the nearly 190,000 acres of federal wildlife refuges in the Valley. Officials say they catch six to 10 people a year removing plants from the refuges, and many more are not detected.

"A lot of times, the individual doing the digging will sell the plants to a nursery. And that (nursery owner) will always say, `Well gee, I don't know where he got these plants.' "

Best said they had some cases "where the plants stolen numbered in the hundreds."

On the refuge lands, increased law enforcement presence reduced plant theft. In 2003, two cases of timber theft and three involving plant cuttings were prosecuted in the refuges, agency spokeswoman Patty Alexander said.

In the stony, hilly ranchlands of the upper Valley, poaching of native peyote cactus on private ranches is widespread.

"It's a systemic, serious problem. My main concern is they're going to make it extinct, at the rate they're poaching it," said Benito Trevino, a Starr County rancher who said poachers have removed all but a fraction of the cactus that once grew on his land. "This is going on in all areas where peyote grows, and they've been doing it for generations -- it's passed on from father to son."

The small cactus has powerful hallucinogenic properties and can be legally used in Native American religious rituals.

``It's a very, very low priority. They consider it something like jaywaking," Trevino said. ``It's not that they don't have the resources. They don't want to do the paperwork, so they just let them go.''

And it is easy for plant poachers to blend in with the legitimate activities of nursery operators and landscapers, who buy native palms and plants from property owners and remove them for resale.

In recent years, a huge demand has developed for the state's only native palm, the Texas sabal, because it has proved to be one of the few freeze-tolerant species. The remaining sabal palms in the Valley fetch top prices -- up to $3,600 for a 20-foot specimen -- because seedling palms grown in nurseries typically grow 6 inches a year and take years to reach marketable size.

In a lawsuit filed in Cameron County court-at-law, Huddleston claims that in June 2001 nurseryman Juan Aguirre and a crew removed the large palms from the rear of his 40-acre home near the Rio Grande.

The 300 sabal palms on Huddleston's property and others in the area known as Southmost are the remnants of an extensive, 80,000-acre palm forest that lined the river in colonial times.

Huddleston called a sheriff's deputy to the scene, but the officer allowed the palms to be trucked off after Aguirre said he bought them from Huddleston's neighbor for $100 each. The neighbor has since died, but Aguirre says he has a receipt he issued for the sale.

However, Huddleston maintains the neighbor's 1-acre tract contained few palms and claims Aguirre went far beyond his neighbor's property line, where he photographed holes left by the removal of nearly two dozen large palms. They were sold to nurseries in the Austin and Houston areas and were planted at expensive homes and golf courses.

The civil case is scheduled for trial next month, and it provides a rare look at the complexities of trading in the much sought-after native plants.

"Demand has been so high, people like palms and they like the tropical effect around their pools," said Larry Galbreath, general manager of Pletcher's Wholesale Nursery in Harlingen. The family nursery, despite a barbed-wire topped fence around the property, has frequent nighttime visitors.

"Theft (of palms) is very rampant around here," Galbreath said. "What happens is one of two things: Either they know what they're doing and take a shovel and dig it up the correct way, and ball it up. But sometimes they'll take a shovel and cut the roots, and cover it with dirt and sell it for a cheap price."

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The longtime nursery man said when someone is caught with stolen plants, it is hard to prove where they came from.

"It's very difficult to prosecute people, because if you don't see them with a shovel in their hand digging a palm, they say they were just looking. You can't accuse them of stealing."